How do citizens in the United States and China evaluate the fairness of the international system and the impartiality of its legal institutions? As the two countries vie for global leadership, public perceptions of the existing order and visions for its reform can shape global trajectories by influencing support for or resistance to their governments’ efforts to reshape world order. While prior research has examined public attitudes toward bilateral relations, far less attention has been paid to how these publics view the broader structure and principles of the global order, a focal point of normative debate over which superpower and which vision will best serve humanity. This talk addresses this gap through a comparative survey of American and Chinese publics. It is found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the two publics converge substantially in their views on the sources and solutions to global injustice, while diverging in their assessments of the current system’s fairness, with Americans expressing higher level of dissatisfaction.

Xiaojun Li is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of British Columbia. His research lies at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics. His recent books include Token Forces: How Tiny Troop Deployments became Ubiquitous in UN Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press 2022), Fragmenting Globalization: The Politics of Preferential Trade Liberalization in China and the United States (University of Michigan Press 2021), and How China Sees the World: Insights from China’s International Relations Scholars (Palgrave 2019). He holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University and was a Princeton-Harvard China and the World Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, a POSCO Visiting Scholar at the East-West Center in Honolulu, and an inaugural Wang Gungwu Fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.